Nowadays, in the print and broadcast media everything is all-too-promiscuously labeled irony and/or ironic, to the point where in its November 18th edition The New York Times gave a grotesque amount of space to an essay entitled "How to Live Without Irony" in its Sunday Review section. This low-brow divagation elicited a letter to the editor from your humble blogger, which the newspaper—characteristically—chose not to publish, so here it is for the record:

“ TO THE EDITOR:

Christy Wampole's 'How to Live Without Irony' (November 18) offers food for thought but, for all its prolixity, entirely misses stating what is at the core of irony as a rhetorical strategy, namely its negativity, its inability to signify anything of positive value. In terms developed by the modern founder of sign theory (semiotics), the American philosopher-scientist Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914), irony can never go beyond being an index, merely calling attention to itself and always necessarily falling short of being a symbol, which is the only kind of sign that encompasses positive meaning.

Worse yet, irony always tends toward masking the judgmental nature of what is being paraded as fact or the inefficacy of an effete judgment. The ironic statement thus runs the risk of ending up as just another cliché. That is precisely why the contemporary generation of "temporary sophisticates" (in Wayne Booth's apt characterization of those who assume the ironic stance), with their heavy reliance on digitally-bound signification, can only comment on the object of their ironizing without ever contributing to its real substance.

”

Apropos, only the most dogged literalist, without any real-life experience of the situational use of the proverb cited in the preceding post ("Language as an Aesthetic Object"), could comment that the mother must have "taken umbrage" at having her child's provenience ascribed to adultery, thereby implying some kind of misplaced cosmic irony in her expressed admiration withal of the proverb's poetic form and of its utterer.

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Charles Santiago Sanders Peirce's name

Pronounced/pɝːs/."Peirce", in the case of C.S. Peirce, always rhymes with the English-language word "terse" and so, in most dialects, is pronounced exactly like the English-language word "purse". Also see "Note on the Pronunciation of 'Peirce'", The Peirce [Edition] Project Newsletter, v. 1, #3/#4, Dec. 1994.

Producers of the Writings of Charles S. Peirce, A Chronological Edition (ongoing) and The Essential Peirce vol. 2. Online gratis: some Peirce writings, various study aids (such as the Robin Catalog, see further down in this sidebar) & Peirce-biographical introductions:

Peirce's texts online

"The Categories" (PDF 177 KiB) MS 403. A later version by Peirce of most of his 1867 paper "On a New List of Categories", interleaved by RANSDELL with the original 1867 "New List" itself for comparison.

Books and Journal Issues about Pragmatism:1990-1999, 2000-2009, often with tables of contents from anthologies and journal issues.

The Metaphysical Club. Brief account plus bibliographies of the individuals. Charles Peirce, William James, Chauncey Wright, along with Nicholas St. John Green (the "grandfather of Pragmatism") & Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

PORT images of Peirce's manuscripts. If you try to save an image but your program seems to give you the sole option of saving it as a .bmp file (which could be huge), try typing the filename including the ".jpeg" extension into the "save as" field.

Gone but unforgotten by the Wayback Machine

Many of the links in the stored old pages lead successfully to other stored old pages (including stored old versions of pages that are still maintained and findable on the Internet). Links to stored high-resolution photo images are a bit spotty sometimes and one may need to visit more than one stored version of the given page in order to find a working link to a given stored photo image.

PORT photo images of Peirce manuscripts. UPDATE: Tepfenhart's home page is back at its old URL and anyway the images are also at GEP. But I'll keep these Wayback Machine links here "just in case". Update's end.

Bill Tepfenhart's Home Page. Photo images of Peirce's manuscripts. Some of the images are around 20MB. I saved one and, for some reason, my computer gave me the sole option of saving it as a .bmp file (and that would have been hundreds of MBs!), but I just typed the old filename including its extension (.jpeg) into the popup window and was able to save it properly.